Jerry Boyd, a veteran Los Angeles boxing trainer and ringside "cut man" who battled rejection slips for 40 years before becoming a literary sensation at age 70 with a collection of boxing short stories written under the pen name F.X. Toole, has died. He was 72.
Boyd, a Redondo Beach resident, died Sept 2 of complications after heart surgery in a Torrance hospital.
Boyd surprised the regulars at the L.A. Boxing Club near the Olympic Auditorium two years ago when "Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner" was published by Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
They had no idea that the tall, lean trainer with the white, brush-cut hair, trim white beard and round, dark-rimmed eyeglasses was a writer.
But Boyd, a rough-and-ready guy who once had a chunk of his right ear chewed off during a street fight with a man he found ransacking his British sports car, preferred to keep his writing separate from his day job.
A latecomer to boxing, Boyd didn't begin his career as a trainer and cut man, whose job it is to stop the bleeding of battered fighters between rounds, until his early 50s.
By then, he had held a succession of jobs, including bartender, cement truck driver and vat cleaner at a Good Humor Creamery. He even had a stint as a bullfighter in Mexico in the 1950s, during which he was gored three times.
Over the decades, with no formal training other than being an avid reader, Boyd wrote--everything from short stories and novels to plays and screenplays.
But unlike boxers who experience at least the occasional triumph, Boyd knew only disappointment.
Rejection slips, he'd say after they had ceased being a concern, are worse than getting knocked out in boxing.
"For years I'd say ... I don't have any talent. I'm not going to do it anymore," he told the San Francisco Chronicle after his book was published.
But then, like a bloodied fighter who manages to raise himself up after being driven to the mat, he would start writing again.
Boyd's change of literary fortune began in 1999 when he made his first sale--a short story about a cut man who seeks revenge on a scheming boxer--to Zyzzyva, a San Francisco literary journal.
Boyd had sent the story in cold, plucking the literary magazine's name out of Writer's Market.
He celebrated the $50 sale by eating three dark chocolates and drinking a glass of single-malt scotch.
